Read How to Hang a Witch for Free Online Page B

before.”
    Great. I get to be the new girl in Salem High
and
in the town. “I just moved here.”
    “You’ll be needing a library card. What’s your full name?”
    “Samantha Mather,” I whisper.
    “What was that, now? Speak up, girl,” she says, and leans a little closer.
    “Samantha Mather,” I say a little louder, more conscious of my own last name than I’ve ever been.
    “Mather, is it?” she replies at full volume. She raises a disapproving eyebrow at me. “Lots of history here. Not all of it good.”
    I nod, and can feel eyes staring at my back. I bet there are at least a couple of people here who know about my locker incident today.
    “Do you know where I could find information about where people lived in the late sixteen and early seventeen hundreds? And maybe a map?” I ask, anxious to leave the onlookers.
    “Upstairs to your left, in the back, small room on your right. Have copies of all the original town documents from around the time of the Witch Trials. Come back when you’re done and we’ll see about that card.”
    “Thanks.” I dart for the stairs without making eye contact with anyone.
You can judge me, but I don’t have to look at you while you’re doing it.
    —
    Two hours with a stack of dusty old books at a small wooden table in a cramped room and I’m finally getting some useful information. I found the address for Symonds’s house that Perley referenced in his essay “Where the Salem ‘Witches’ Were Hanged.” But it’s unclear if it exists anymore. It doesn’t line up with the current streets.
    I run my hand along a pile of books about my relatives Cotton Mather and Increase Mather. If my last name is gonna be such an issue here, I want to know why. I mean, they
were
highly respected members of society. Increase even brought over the charter from England saying that Massachusetts was a province.
    Unfortunately, Cotton was kinda the thorn. He was crazy smart, graduated Harvard at sixteen, and wrote seven languages, including Iroquois, by the time he was twenty-five. Some historians say he was good and honest, but more think he was the main instigator of the Witch Trials. He was so concerned with uprooting “evil” that he was willing to let people hang to do it. I can’t help but think how the tables have turned for the Mathers in Salem.
    A shadow falls on the page I’m reading. I look up to find Lizzie standing just outside the doorway of the reference room. I notice she has two different-colored eyes—one golden brown and one green—that seem more dramatic because of her black hair.
    “So it’s true,” she says, and inspects her black nails with glittery skulls painted on them.
    “ ’Scuse me?” I fold the paper with the information I was collecting and push it into my pocket.
    “They told me you were here.”
    What’s her angle? “They, who?”
    “You can’t hide in a town like this, Mather.”
    I can’t help but think about the witch accusations. And the fact that she’s addressing me by my last name doesn’t escape me. “Are you saying you followed me here?”
    “What I’m saying is that I know where you are.” She lifts her gaze from her nails, and her two-toned eyes assess me.
    Goose bumps sprint down my arms. I’m not even going to pretend I’m not creeped out by this. She clearly doesn’t mean just now. She means always. I try to play it off. “So, what, you spend your free time tracking me? Your life sounds like it sucks.”
    For the briefest of seconds her eyes narrow. “You’ll find that there’re only a few things that matter in Salem and that you’re not one of them. No one cares what happens to you here.”
    Was that a threat? If there is one thing I learned in the City, it’s that I can’t show her this bothers me. “I’m not sure I care if you know where I am. You found me reading a book. Congratulations on your discovery.”
    She actually smiles. “Give it time. You will.”
    That’s it. I’m done with this